AI is currently the big driver in datacenter investment and will push capital expenditure on the facilities up by nearly 30 percent this year, and is also on track to become the top server workload by deployment within a few years.
Servers sales are set grow 74 percent to $210 billion this year – up from 2023's figure of $121 billion. However, datacenter thermal management spend is forecast to grow by 22 percent, reaching $9.4 billion. Power distribution infrastructure revenue will exceed $4 billion in revenue for the first time, and uninterruptible power supply revenue will grow 10 percent to $13 billion.
AI training can be classified as an R&D activity, and will therefore become subject to plan-based budget allocation, according to Omdia – meaning a share of revenue reinvested. Omdia's data shows that single-phase direct-to-chip technology is by far the most popular variety of liquid cooling tech, thanks to its simplicity and maturity, and this is likely to remain the case.